Methods of Counting

Universities count their Nobel Prizes in various ways, normally whatever gives them the most or the highest ranking among universities. By most accounts, Columbia has most Nobel Laureates of any university in the world, with 98 affiliated prize-winners[1]. The University of Chicago, despite all of their claims to be the best, comes in third with only 85, trailing Cambridge by only 2 laureates.

However, there is controversy in this. Columbia counts all past and present alumni, faculty, and "affiliates" of the university who have ever won a Nobel Prize in its tally. This includes such questionable names as Linda Buck (postdoctoral research fellow), who fortunately shared it with alumnus and professor Richard Axel. Another questionable choice was Orhan Pamuk, whose principal pre-Nobel Columbia affiliation stemmed from the fact that he wrote a novel in a Butler reading room and gave a lecture to a mob of graduate students once. Naturally, after he won the prize, he was instantly promoted to Visiting Professor and named to the prestigious, prominent, and coherent Committee on Global Thought.

However, the one thing Columbia does pretty well in terms of counting is exclude affiliates who were with the university for less than one year. Chicago, on the other hand, decides to include them, even if they were there for just a few weeks.

Understandably, schools juggle and warp the numbers to fit their goals of maximizing their Nobel yield. For example, prior to Linda Buck and Richard Axel jointly winning the 2004 Prize in Physiology, Columbia praised its number of Nobel Prizes. After the Prize announcement, Columbia began to tout its number of Nobel Laureates (since Buck and Axel shared the Prize, it made for two laureates, instead of one prize). A second example is that Princeton shares Columbia's obsession with counting all alumni, faculty, and "affiliates" for the simple reason that Princeton, until post-World War II, did not have a sizable research program, and to this day is primarily an undergraduate institution.

The Nobel authorities seem to count university affiliation by the institution the laureate was affiliated with at the time of the award-winning announcement[2], a standard that Harvard adheres to. Nonetheless, a sizable community of purists believes that university affiliation should only be awarded where the laureate conducted the prize-winning research at said university. By that "official" Nobel count, Columbia may claim a modest 17 prizes.